The Most Popular Reader Comments on The Times

Staffers on The Times community desk: (from left) Eric Copage, Bassey Etim, Lela Moore and Marcia Loughran.CreditJames Estrin/The New York Times

By Bassey Etim

Nov. 23, 2015

With so many hours logged in a sea of emotions, insights and opinions, it seems impossible for Times comment moderators not to feel some kinship with those who are doing the commenting.

Here’s a glimpse at what we deal with:

• Around 9,000 submitted comments per day.

• Over 60,000 unique contributors per month.

• Approximately two million comment recommendations each month.

All of this for a system that allows comments only on a select few Times stories, with nearly every comment delayed for moderation, usually by a Times staffer. We review each submission, passing along your corrections and concerns to the newsroom, and protect thoughtful contributors from swarms of trolls.

Perhaps it seems an oddball approach for an industry that rewards speed, but our hypothesis many years ago was that readers of The Times would demand an elevated commenting experience. We also thought that Times readers, given the opportunity, could help teach us how to cover the news as the industry faced seismic changes.

For some time now, The Times’s Community desk has been working toward a vision where we cover you, our most dedicated commenters in much the same way we would a traditional news beat.

We have written about contributions: Critical enterprise stories get sidebars summing up reader responses, a moderator regularly contributes to the Taking Note blog to dig deep into controversial debates, and the public editor’s desk has written a range of posts about our moderation practices.

But what we haven’t done until now is take some time to report on the commenters as individuals. A feature on 14 of the top Times commenters published Monday represents our first broad effort to get to know our commenters on a personal level, and to help them learn more about one another.

The methodology to select this group of 14 varied, but most were chosen based on a simple metric: the total number of recommendations received divided by the number of submitted comments, with a small bonus added for each “NYT Pick.”

The next question is clear: What are the most popular Times comments of all time? Below is a list of the top five, with excerpts from each.

My household makes just over $250,000 here in Canada. One of the best bargains I get for my money is living in a place where I and everyone I know sends their kids to public schools because they are really good. We end up with few criminals, because students learn how to be productive good citizens in schools.

A second bargin I get is universal health care. Great care (rated well above the American system in most measures) whenever you need it without worry about not being approved. It all comes at a bargain price of about 50% of the cost of the US health system.

A third bargain is the modernizing infrastructure. Cities in Canada are building new commuter train systems, rebuilding old overpasses and other roadways, building new schools, new recreation centres, etc. We are not quite like a new city in China, but we are not the decrepit cities of the USA where governments are shutting the lights out at night because they have no money. In Canada, we realize that we can’t live off of the work of our grandfathers forever.

I am Irish. For many years in my native land the Rev. Ian Paisley spouted bigoted hatred about Catholics in Northern Ireland, but then claimed innocence when some militant sectarian group massacred Catholics. Speech was not murder, he said. He would never condone killing, he said. Then he went right back to feeding the attitudes that spawned the killing. Few were fooled.

The mythology of free enterprise alone leading to national wealth growth is an urban legend. The Erie canal that connected the Atlantic Ocean to the Great Lakes turned Manhattan from an island port to the world’s financial center. No canal, no skyscrapers, no free enterprise.

The same can be said by the North building a railway and telegraph system that defeated the South, kept the Union in-tact and was used by free enterprise to productively exploit western expansion. FHA and the GI Bill provided free enterprise with an unprecedented educated middle class to exploit. The national interstate highway was built, despite the national debt being 60% of GDP, allowed suburban expansion and better supply chains. Finally the Apollo program led to many inventions we use today. Most impressive though was the inspiration of a generation to become engineers and become the world’s greatest inventor.

In each case, came targeted government investment and then free enterprise and wealth creation of everyone.

The president has suffered a disastrous failure of imagination. His only consideration has been how best to position himself for the 2012 election. Forget for a moment that it is all too likely that the adverse economic consequences of his deal will complicate his reelection bid considerably, he has failed to recognize that his abject surrender has consequences for American government and American life that will be far more profound and more long lasting than whichever individual gets elevated to the White House next year.

This is a shameful day to be a Democrat and a shameful day to be an American.